Look out your car window and, sometimes, between the billboards, you can see a tree. In the good old days before we started covering the land with concrete, there used to be whole forests. Now the trees are gone and the ground is covered up, all we get are floods – the water can no longer soak into the ground and disappear. Of course, some of us keep trees as pets in our yards. We miss the old times and enjoy watching something big and green growing up into the sky. And yet. . . Have you ever wondered what holds the trees upright? Yes, these wonders of nature do grow up into the sky but, to ensure they don’t just fall over every time the wind blows, they develop big root systems. Many of these roots spread underneath our homes and can cause problems with the foundations. Some roots go the other way and produce that delightfully uneven sidewalk our old folk like to trip over when their eyesight’s not so good.

If the roots from one of your trees produces cracks in your neighbor’s home, or a stranger passing by falls over a cracked sidewalk, you can face a claim. This will usually be covered under the liability section of the policy. You can also face enforcement action from your local council. Local laws usually entitle the council to order you to remove “dangerous” trees and make good the sidewalk. If you refuse, the council can come on to your land, remove the tree and send you the bill. Whoever’s responsible for maintaining the road outside your home is likely to have similar powers. Completely removing a large tree can be an expensive business. Unfortunately, your insurance policy only covers you when your trees cause loss or damage to others. It does not pay out for preventive work to cut back the branches or roots. You get to pay the tree surgeon to do that out of your own savings. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s one unchanging fact when running a business. No matter what the size, you cannot separate the business from its market. It’s for the owner to identify the market niche and sell to it consistently enough to generate a profit. Should something happen to disturb the confidence among the customers/clients, there’s a real risk the business may be lost. This is the current problem for small businesses across America. Although we may have emerged from the recession as a matter of technical accounting at a federal level, there’s a continuing loss of confidence in the markets. At first, the average person cut down on discretionary spending and took action to reduce indebtedness. This significantly reduced buying power and the majority of businesses had to respond by cutting staff. For this reason, unemployment has remained over 9% for the last three years. In fact, the actual number of unemployed is far higher because the federal statistics only count the number of people claiming benefit and, unless market sentiment picks up significantly, unemployment is likely to remain high for the foreseeable future.

However, cutting overheads by reducing staff is a difficult balancing act because of the unemployment insurance (UI) costs. UI is a program to pay cash to those who lose their jobs. It’s jointly administered by the federal and state governments. In theory, it’s a program based on the notion of fairness. If a business terminates an employee, that business owes a responsibility to cushion the loss of pay while the ex-employee seeks alternate employment. Except, the rise in UI costs has made the economics of dismissal difficult. UI is a tax based on three factors: the size of the payroll, the amount the business has paid into as UI, and the amount claimed from that UI fund. So if a business is proposing to terminate a fairly senior employee of long-standing, the business should consider what claim this employee might make for benefit. Even one claim can result in a tax increase of several thousand dollars. Read the rest of this entry »

The problem can be stated simply. If you take your eyes off the road, you will not see the other vehicle coming toward you. This makes you a danger to other road users. The group most likely to fall into this trap are young drivers. Not only are they the least experienced behind the wheel. They are also the ones with the most peer pressure to reply to the text message or answer the cell phone call immediately. The evidence cannot be more clear. Looking at all the different ways in which teens die through disease and accidents, crashes in motor-vehicles are the leading cause of death. The government estimates that, in 2009, about 5,500 people were killed and more than half-a-million injured because one of the drivers was distracted.

In a perfect world, this would be resolved by a discussion at home. As a parent, you would sit down with your children and explain the risks. The statistics are available on the internet to back up your warnings. Your children would nod their heads wisely and swear by all they hold holy not to continue this dangerous practice. Except this would not work in most families. What teens say to their parents is not how they act when they are outside the home. So now comes the hard choice. Do you sit back and rely on prayer every time they drive off into the wild blue yonder, or do you take positive steps? First, a little law: it’s a criminal offense to operate any transmitter that will block or jam wireless communications. So you would face big fines if you were found jamming mobile phone signals. But it’s probably not an offense if you instal equipment in your vehicle that acts as a passive block to the signal. The reason for the distinction is that if you created a cone of silence around your vehicle by transmitting a signal to jam all the cell towers, you would cut off all the other users in your area. While this might make the roads safer, it would seriously inconvenience everyone else. More importantly, it might interfere with emergency calls for the police and ambulance. So passive shielding is probably legal because it does not interfere with any other vehicle or person on the sidewalk. Taking this simple step means you no longer have trust issues with your teen (until he or she works out how to turn it off or get round the shielding, e.g. by putting an antenna outside the vehicle). Read the rest of this entry »